Free Warming Trend by Karin Kallmaker Page A

answered Lisa, her voice was steady with conviction. “I don’t want to win her back.”
    “I don’t believe you,” Lisa said, still without her usual acerbic tone. “And I notice you didn’t deny she’s the love of your life. You’ve never even tried to replace her, Ms. Frigid, have you?”
    Ani decided that if Lisa ever took up psychotherapy she’d be truly dangerous. “You don’t understand. I let her down. I let Monica Tyndell down.”
    “Did you kill someone’s cat? Drop a baby on its head?”
    “No.”
    “Then how come an apology and making amends wasn’t enough?”
    Ani shook her head. “There wasn’t isn’t any way to make it better. It can’t be undone. It’s like like untelling a secret. You break trust like that, you can’t put the genie back in that bottle.”
    Lisa rummaged in her oversized purse and came up with a packet of crackers. Offering some to Ani, she said, “I might be more helpful if I knew what my hot girlfriend, who is a rich bartender, did all those years ago that’s so unforgivable.”
    Ani was daunted. The reason she’d run away from Glacier Port was real. But someone who didn’t understand how that world worked wouldn’t understand her actions. Academics were fond of teaching examples of bucking the system, of excellence through maverick ideas and methods, all fine and good, but none of it applied to academia itself, which ran a certain way and stayed that way. Once an academic conviction was reached, changing minds was almost impossible. Lamely, she said, “I don’t know where to begin.”
    Lisa rolled her eyes. “Start in the middle and work in both directions. Make it hard on me.”
    “You’re incredibly annoying,” Ani said, without heat. She had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as she realized that things she’d hoped she’d forgotten were still vividly accessible in her head.
    “That’s why you love me.”
    “Dream on.”
    Lisa heaved a longsuffering sigh, but she loosened her seatbelt a little and gave Ani all her attention.
    It wasn’t hard to talk about the beginning. Describing the northern lights and dancing with Eve was pretty easy. The memories were so sweet.
    She had only waited a day to call Eve. After twisting the night away she hadn’t expected to wake up to a brilliant sun of promise and the sincere regret that she’d not kissed Eve when she’d dropped her at home.
    In summer, caterers were busy people, and it had been nearly two weeks before Eve had been able to promise time. A daylight picnic was the proposal, and they met at the entrance to the university’s botanical gardens at eleven a.m. Ani had spent the entire morning responding to Dr. Tyndell’s instructions to “Organize this” after she handed over a stack of temperature logs. Normally, it was what she lived for, but more than once she’d realized she was staring out the window of the professor’s office, not even seeing the bayhawks circling their nests.
    Waiting at the garden entrance, she tugged nervously at her shorts, worried they were too utilitarian, even if they were clean. Clean clothes were hard to maintain in a dorm. She’d played it safe with a deep blue polo that featured the GlacierPort logo on the breast pocket. There was nothing she could do about her hair. The relaxing shampoo she’d been using for the last two weeks seemed to be helping a little, but it still curled and twisted any way it liked.
    She had enough time to worry that maybe the easy conversation and the delight of the unexpected dancing had just been a fluke. Eve couldn’t be that lovely, could she? Surely something about her was flawed she just didn’t want to remember what it was.
    When Eve’s hair caught the midday sun as she walked toward her from the parking lot, Ani knew her memory wasn’t false. Eve was that lovely, imperfectly beautiful. In the bright light her shoulder-length hair was a splash of yellow over a collared shirt patterned with blue and green diamonds. In